Animorphs: The Changeover
by RaeLaser1
Summary: This Animorph is fighting her battles. Alone… AU: CROSSOVER EVENTUALLY WITH CANONVERSE Hello. My name is Sarah. Just Sarah. Sarah No-Name
1. Chapter 1

ANIMORPHS

_The Changover_

_This Animorph is fighting her battles. Alone… _AU; crossover eventually with canonverse.

Hello. My name is Sarah. That's it. Just Sarah. Sarah No-name. I used to have a last name, a pretty ordinary last name really, nothing special. That doesn't mean I'm going to tell you what it is.

See, aliens are out to kill me. Not that they know this. They think they're out to kill another alien. Not an alien like them though. I'm different. Not the human alien that I am, in reality; the alien that they _think _I am.

Maybe I should start over.

The aliens who want to kill me (the alien me that I'm not) are called Yeerks. And the reason they want to kill me is because I am preventing them from carrying out their goal, which is total domination of earth, enslaving every human being on the planet.

They are slugs. Worms, maybe. Or maybe I shouldn't try to classify them by Earth animal standards since they are, in fact, aliens. But that's what they look like. Old gum on someone's sneaker. A really big wad of snot. A slug.

Except, these unshelled snails are pretty pimped out for things that don't have arms or eyes. They've got laser guns. They've got spaceships. They've got portable mini-suns, and they take their swimming pools with them wherever they go.

And also, they can crawl into your ear and take over your brain.

I guess it's better than crawling up your nose. Or maybe they do . . . However they do it, you end up a slave, prisoner inside your own head, with some snotty, chewed-gum alien sneering at you from inside the wrinkles of your brain.

I am fighting these snot-rags of the universe, and I am doing it alone. Well, alone is not quite right. But I am the only human. My friend, Anifal, is the only other person who knows about this invasion of personal rights and privacy. And she's an alien too!

Not a slug-alien of course, don't get me wrong. She's a different kind of alien. I'm not sure exactly how many kinds of aliens there are, but clearly there's at least two. She calls herself an Andalite, like I'd know different if she wasn't, but the first Andalite I met called himself that too, so I guess I'll have to take her word for it.

She looks a bit like a purplish-blue centaur, except without a mouth. And she doesn't have any hair except for her fur. And she's got a long tail, with a small but wickedly sharp scythe-blade on it. Come to think of it, that's a lot of things a centaur wouldn't have, so maybe she doesn't look like one after all. But she has a vaguely humanoid body attached to a vaguely horse-like body, so maybe she is.

I've had to do things during this silent war that were hard. For example, two years ago I faked my death.

I did this by turning into a fish.

It was the hardest thing I've ever done, faking my death. Don't get me wrong, the actual deed was easy. I just 'fell' off of my family's boat when we were all taking a fishing trip together, and while I was underwater being dragged away by the rough current, I simply morphed into a fish and swam away.

It was afterwards that was hard, knowing my family was suffering and crying and combing the waters for my body which they would never find… That was the hard part.

But enough about that. You probably want to know how I was turning into fishes to begin with. It started with an alien (yes, another one) who was dying. I happened to run into him while I was walking home through an abandoned construction site. Many times since then I've wished I had just taken a different route, but more often than that, I've simply wished I hadn't gone that way _alone_.

So this alien, this Andalite, this Andalite called Elfangor, lands heavily damaged in this nasty ex-construction site, and decides that this one little girl (that's me) had a chance of at least holding back the Yeerks until the rest of the Andalites arrived to wipe out the Yeerks.

He had me go and fetch something from his cabin, a small blue box. He had me put my hand on one of the panels, and bam boom pow, I had the ability to turn into any animal I could lay hands on, something he called _morphing_.

He told me everything I've just told you, impressed upon me the need to fight, and then urged me to run. The Yeerks were coming for him, and I couldn't just die there.

Run! Run! he urged me telepathically (how else would a creature with no mouth talk?) and I did run, but not very far. I had to see the rest of these aliens.

Ah yes, that reminds me. Hork-Bajir and Taxxons. Hork-Bajir look like maybe a species of dinosaurs that never went extinct. A blender mix of big lizard body, sharp snapping beak, oversized claws, blades growing out of the arms, legs, tail, and head, and big, T-Rex feet. Put them all together at about eight feet tall, and ladies and gentlemen, you have a Hork-Bajir.

A Taxxon must be what centipedes want to be when they grow up. The size of a large man, with a wormy body, hundreds of little clacking legs, and a big round hungry mouth.

In case you missed the memo, these all have Yeerks in their brains, their every move directed by a little muddy tyrant lodged in their heads.

That is what I fight, every day.

[Princess Sarah!] Anifal called from the sky. She was perched in a tree above me. Not as an Andalite, you understand, which; as a horse-person-centaur mix would be a very awkward sight; but as a red cardinal. Anifal has a very limited knowledge of earth species, but she has admitted that the cardinal is her favorite bird thus far.

"Have you found anything out?" I demanded. A little snappy perhaps, but it had been a week since we had last found a way to strike at the Yeerks, and they were bound to have recovered from the damage we dealt them by now.

Anifal fluttered to the ground and began to demorph, explaining as she did so. [I have found another entrance to the Yeerk Pool. It was hard to find. The Yeerks are becoming more and more careful.]

I recognized that it was time for a leaderly word of wisdom and encouragement. The reason that Anifal calls me 'Princess' is because she decided (a bit arbitrarily, in my opinion) that I was to be her leader, and that she would follow my orders. Although apparently Andalites don't usually hold with female leaders, and I'd had to tell her what the feminine form of 'prince' is. Typical. Male-dominated universe. Except some species on earth have the female as the dominant one. So maybe it's not as bad as I thought.

Keeping all this in mind, I maintained eye contact, which Anifal had let slip is reassuring for an Andalite, and, smiling, told her, "Yes, but you're smarter than they are careful. They're not going to be able to slip one by you."

I didn't use wimpy words, like _I think_, or _I'm sure._ Because, no matter how subtly, those words expressed doubt. _I think you can, but maybe you can't. I'm sure you're on the right track, but maybe I'm wrong_. If she didn't sense doubt from me, then it was less likely that she would doubt herself. Psych 1 01. Effective on humans and Andalites alike.

When it comes down to it, that's what being a leader is. Manipulating people. I wish Anifal would've just announced _herself_ leader. Then she could do the planning and leading and manipulating, and I could have a break.

"So where is it?" I asked.

* * *

It was in a mall. In a clothing store. The Gap®, to be precise. The Gap® dressing room, to be even more precise. And Anifal was right, the Yeerks _were_ being more careful. The entrance was a door on the back wall of the dressing room. The whole thing, including the keypad, was hidden by a hologram. And the door was locked, only the right password would open it. But if you wanted to see the keypad and door, you had to step into the hologram. Which meant that Anifal had to stand with her face squished up against a wall for nearly three minutes while she hacked in.

Just then, the door rattled. No, not that door, the dressing room door. "Anybody in here?" a voice of indeterminate gender asked.

"Piss off!" I shouted.

"Sorry, geez," he-she muttered, possibly trundling off.

"I have it," Anifal whispered as the door silently swooshed open. We paused for a moment, looking into our unfamiliar human features, and then we entered into the Yeerk Pool.

When you're a hungry wolf near a herd of sheep, what's the best route to take? Go in as a wolf? Hardly. Disguise yourself as the shepherd? Only if you're bold. No, the best route to take is to become another sheep. Almost every time we engaged the Yeerks, we grabbed another random human morph. Perhaps later on during the skirmish we would reveal ourselves as the wolves, but first we infiltrated.

As humans, we could have been any random Yeerk-infested controllers coming back to the pool.

We had mastered the art of looking like we belonged here. If approached, we could even engage in small talk without fear of being exposed. If asked, I would tell them my name was Seplin 9466.

We would purposefully make our way to a less occupied place, and then begin the process of whatever sabotage we had planned.

Today, I had a particularly ruthless plan in mind, one that would kill a lot of Yeerks. It was also absurdly simple in premise.

The Yeerks crawl into people's heads. But they also need to come out again and feed, which they do by soaking up the rays of their artificial sun, the kandrona. When these humans and aliens are uninfested they can't just leave them lying around, they'd escape. So they're placed in big metal cages, where they let out the most wretched, gut-twisting moans and screams of misery that you can't imagine.

When a Yeerk is done feeding, the host is dragged over to the pool, and their head stuck in the water so that the Yeerk could just slide on back inside.

Well, not this time.

Anifal and I found our little solitary corner, and we began to demorph. I'll tell you something, as wonderful as it is to be able to change shape, the getting-there part is something else. Since I was only morphing from human to human, nothing remarkable happened, a little stretching, a little blurring, some unidentified grinding sounds.

But Anifal…

Have you ever seen a long blue tail sprouting out the rear end of an ordinary-looking human being? Watched tiny little hoofs sprout out of that person's stomach as they gained about a foot in length in the waist, as their spine curved, as hair sucked back into the scalp, replaced by golden eyes on stalks, as their mouth sealed over?

No, I don't think you have. It's pretty shocking. Morphing is gross. You have to morph back to your own body to morph a different one. And you can only stay in morph for two hours or you can never morph again, and you're stuck in that morph forever. It was a risk we took every time we morphed.

Now we were going to morph Hork-Bajir. And it will never stop being weird and disgusting, watching a four-legged creature become a two-legged one.

As for myself, my height was what changed first. I shot up over three feet in seconds. My feet turned hard and scaly, two toes retracting on each foot.

_Snikt! Snikt! Snikt! _Deadly blades spat out through my skin. My skull, elbows, and ankles were now all decorated with razorblades.

_Sproot!_ My spine shot out through my back, white and naked. A moment later it was covered in leathery Hork-Bajir skin, but it left me feeling sick anyways.

My eyes travelled around to the sides of my head, while my lips and nose hardened and extended into a toothed beak.

I was almost completely Hork-Bajir except for the shaggy mop of brown hair on my head which had yet to disappear. Anifal, who had finished morphing first, saw this and snickered, giving me a stiff Hork-Bajir grin. Of course, if I accused her of snickering, she would deny it vehemently. Something about it being below an Andalite's dignity.

[Very funny. Come on, let's just do the thing.] I grumbled.

Two Hork-Bajir marched purposefully up to a cage, and rattled the bars intimidatingly, making leering faces as best as can be made with stiff Hork-Bajir faces. This of course was a timesaver while we explained to the terrified human occupant the plan.

[We're here to help! We have a plan! We are the Andalite bandits! We're going to help you get away!] we chanted at the poor man, repeating it until he finally nodded. He was shaking like a leaf.

I reached for the cage door, and immediately came across a problem. It was; of course; _locked. _I dithered helplessly for a moment, my brain grinding to a halt. _What now, what now?!!_

Anifal calmly reached over, hooked her wrist blade into the lock, and twisted sharply. The lock fell apart with a sad little ding. Gathering my self control, I reached in and lifted the man to his feet, who simply stayed limp and looked at us.

"_Struggle!" _I hissed at him. For a moment he just flopped about a little as we pulled him over to the murky pool, but then he got the right idea, and started twisting and yanking. Then he really got into it and started howling and shrieking, his eyes bulging, veins popping out on his neck, and his face turning bright red.

"Nooooooooooo!" he howled dramatically, kicking his feet and flailing his arms. My sensitive ears were ringing. I tried to resist glancing around, but from what I could tell from my very excellent peripherals, nobody suspected that we didn't belong out here. As long as we looked like we knew what we were doing, nobody would jump out yelling, "Hey! What are you doing with that host?"

We finally got him to the murky pool. Together, we suspended him over the water-like stuff and started to lower him. But here was the trick, we didn't let his head actually go beneath the surface of the water, although it was difficult now that his kicking and screaming had become real.

Using his body as a cover, Anifal casually pressed a few buttons on the grey cylinder she had snagged earlier, and then, casually, oh-so-casually, dropped it into the Yeerk Pool.

[Stop screaming] I commanded.

He stopped.

We pulled him back up. Anifal turned and wandered off. I patted the man on the shoulder for appearances, and began giving him instructions. [Act normally. The way your Yeerk would have you acting. Be casual. Be calm and cool. The exit is that set of stairs to your right. Make your way out through there. Do NOT get caught again!]

He nodded shakily. I clapped him gently on the shoulder again and went to join Anifal. This part was crucial, we had to get OUT of there, and quickly.

So of course we were stopped.

Not by anyone who suspected us. Not by Visser 5, come to kill us. But a disgruntled Human-Controller, who wanted someone to listen to him complain.

"Can you believe the shifts the Visser is having us work? Practically three days to the minute. I almost didn't reach the pool in time!" the balding, middle-aged man groused sullenly. "But of course, he can return to the sulp niar whenever it suits him!"

"_Ghanfresh_ _ils_ Visser hears _harktet _complain," Anafil said, drawing her finger across her throat significantly. A habit she had picked up from me. Fortunately she knew a smattering of the Hork-Bajir's native language.

"Yes, well," he said, suddenly ill at ease. "I have work to do." And scuttled off.

We scuttled off too. We made it back to our corner, only to find it occupied. Anafil let out a string of what I've been led to believe was particularly foul language, and we both whirled around. The clock was ticking, we could no longer afford to be subtle.

We rushed about like loons for nearly half a minute (which is much longer than it should be, even if it doesn't sound like it) until we finally found a place suitable for morphing.

[Human?] Anifal panted. She sounded afraid. We had hoped we would be able to leave right away.

[No. No time to walk out. Morph hawk!] I snapped out. But first we had to morph out of Hork-Bajir bodies. Wasted time, precious time.

I felt the changes, but I hardly noted them. I was too busy pushing my morph to go faster. Human again! Now to morph my Northern Goshawk. Skin itched, feather patterns popped out of my skin. My feet dried up and began shrinking ahead of the rest of me. And the eyes, laser intensity, burning red glare. Now all of me was shrinking, with a gurgling, popping, _schlooping_ sensation.

I raised my wings. They weren't quite finished. Anifal had finished before me (again) and was taking off, flapping madly trying to get lift in the dead air.

And then everything went to hell.

The cylinder Anifal had dropped in the pool was a dracon beam, or phaser for you trekkies. She had set it on a timer so it would fire in exactly five minutes. But a dracon beam cannot function correctly with water, or in this case sulp niar, inside its casing. Normally it has a waterproof cover, but Anifal took care of that. The result of all this would be an explosion, killing perhaps thousands of Yeerks.

The problem? The concussion would be serious enough to damage the rest of the facility. The facility that we hadn't managed to escape from yet.

I took advantage of every instinct that hawk had and did my best to coast on the concussion itself. Several yards away, Anifal was doing the same. The air was full of debris, and we were twisting and swerving like gymnasts to avoid it all.

Just then, a support from the ceiling smashed into Anifal, as if a giant fist had come out of the sky and simply swatted her away.

[Anifal!] I screamed, moments before my vision went dark


	2. Chapter 2

ANIMORPHSThe Changover

_This Animorph is fighting her battle. Alone..._

"Ow," I said, sitting up. I didn't say 'ow' because I was actually in pain, you understand. But rather, I had a vague memory of being whanged on the head, and I felt rather like I should be in pain, even though I wasn't.

It was then that I realized with a surge of adrenaline and fear that I was human. I leaped to my feet. Last I remembered I was in the Yeerk Pool! And-

I stopped. This was not the Yeerk Pool. It actually looked rather like how I had imagined clouds to be when I was little. Puffy like marshmallows, soft but firm and bouncy. The stuff was piled in such a way so that there were miniature hills and valleys.

Unwilling to drop my guard just because the place reminded me of a childhood fantasy, I turned and called out, "Anifal? Are you here?"

[I am here] she replied, coming into view over a puffcloud. Her tail was arched and ready, and she was casting about suspiciously. Clearly this place held no comforting reminders of childhood for her. [What..._ is_ this substance?] she inquired distastefully.

"Haven't the faintest," I replied. Anifal cocked her head in puzzlement. "I don't know," I amended

_A MIGHTY ANDALITE ADMITTING IGNORANCE? A STRANGE OCCURENCE INDEED! _A warm voice, rich with amusement rumbled. I had to assume he was referring to Anifal's previous statement, and not my own. Anifal stiffened, her tail arching even more, if possible. [Who are you?] she called aggressively. [Where are you? What have you done with us?]

"Very pertinent," I approved.

_STILL CURIOUS, I SEE. CAN YOU NOT GUESS, ANIFAL-FARLAN-EDAIIR?_

Shocked, Anifal stepped back. [H-how do you know my name?] she demanded.

_I KNOW MANY THINGS._

At this, Anifal's tail dropped completely, and her thin shoulders hunched. I've known her long enough to be able to read her body language somewhat, and what she was displaying now was absolute terror. [Ellimist] she whispered, along with a cold rush of fear.

Anifal seemed to be out for the count. Supposing we survived this, I would ask her just who or what an Ellimist (the capital E was audible) was, but right now we needed answers.

"What do you want?" I called out, taking care not to seem aggressive. If this person could frighten Anifal, then he was probably not to be taken lightly.

_IT IS NOT WHAT I WANT THAT MUST BE ADDRESSED, BUT RATHER WHAT HAS HAPPENED_.

"Oookay," I said. "And just what has happened?"

An old man with a beard slowly sort of... _faded_ into existence in front of us. Behind me, Anifal made a garbled, unintelligible sound in thought-speak. I stepped in front of her to block his view.

He was an odd looking man, not the least because he was blue and glowing. But he obviously wanted eye contact for what he was about to say, because the next thing out of his mouth was, "The two of you have died, I'm afraid."

My first thought was, "Why would _you_ be afraid?"

My second thought was, "No way in hell is this real. I did get bounced in the head, that's all.

And my third thought, the one I actually said aloud was, "So is this heaven or hell?"

The old guy (Eminem's Mist, was it?) looked hugely amused at this. "No, no, nothing like that." His smile faded again. I noticed his voice had lost that huge, booming quality. "I brought you here to offer you a choice."

_Uh-oh_. The news of my death hadn't really sunk in yet, or maybe I didn't believe it. In either case, this offer of a choice sounded sinister.

"You have two options. You can continue on in the natural course of death, and let go of life. Or, I can send you to another reality, to an Earth, to a Universe much like your own, where you could continue your struggle against the Yeerks, or choose to live out your lives normally."

"Another reality? Like an alternate universe?" I asked, a sick, twisty feeling in my stomach.

"Yes."

"You can't do that!" I snapped, the sick feeling changing into full-blown panic. 'Nobody can do that! It's not possible!"

"It's possible for the Ellimist," Anifal told me in private thoughtspeak.

I was angry, but it still wasn't about my apparent death. My heart had realized something before my head. If I could just... Then it clicked.

"What about _our_ Earth?" I whispered. Mr. Yellow Mist gave me a sad, droopy look, and slowly began to explain.

"The two of you were Earth's last defense. Upon your deaths, there were no more obstacles, although it will take them nearly five years to replace the troops that were destroyed in your last stand. The Andalites will arrive too late. Earth will be completely dominated, and too heavily guarded to be destroyed."

_No_

"Take us back!" I demanded furiously. "Put us back! Who cares about some stupid alterna-world? Our Earth, the REAL world is about to be overrun! They NEED us!" I whipped towards Anifal. "Who is this jerk?"

She glanced down with all four eyes for a moment before looking back up and meeting my gaze squarely. [The Ellimist . . . is a part of Andalite folklore. A powerful trickster I . . . do not trust him.]

"I cannot send you back to your world,' he said gently. "You are _dead_ there. There is nothing I can do about that."

"But you can make us alive somewhere else? How does that work?" I challenged.

[Trickery,] Anifal confirmed, swishing her tail.

He spread his hands helplessly. "I simply cannot do it. One thing is not the other. To send you to another world is not to leave you here on your own. Death is not life. You are dead there. You are not dead here. That is the best I can explain."

"I sacrificed EVERYTHING for my world!" I raged. But that's when it hit me. _Everything_. My life. Possibly my mental health. And then my actual, literal _life. _"I sacrificed everything," I whispered. "And it was for nothing. Absolutely nothing. Worthless. Wasted effort. I might as well have just stayed home."

I felt a small hand on my shoulder. Anifal. She was still unfamiliar with human culture, but one thing she had learned was that humans take comfort in physical contact.

I stayed quiet for what felt like a long time, my brain whirling with useless thoughts. I was paralyzed with indecision again. What was real, what wasn't? Were we even here? Would waking up and finding myself back where I had been even be a desirable occurrence? Last I was aware we were in the Yeerk Pool. If we hadn't been killed, then we had been knocked out, and it was doubtful that the Yeerks would have a happy reception in store for us when we awoke. We would have to stay in morph until we were stuck, became _nothlits_, and then we would be killed for real.

But to go to a strange new world where there was no resistance against the Yeerks, where all of our work was undone? Unthinkable.

I took Anifal by the arm and pulled her further away from Yellow-Myth guy and whispered, "What do you think?" Because I had suddenly realized that I wasn't alone in this choice. Anifal had to decide as well.

[I have been thinking, and I have come to the conclusion that we could be in a bad situation at home. I do not believe we are dead – how could we be here if we are dead? - but we are vulnerable nonetheless.]

Apparently she had come to the same conclusion as I had.

[But I do not like this idea of an alternate world. We would be going in uninformed, blindly. Essentially, we would be as helpless there as we would be at home.] She sneered briefly, an interesting expression on her since it involved mostly her eyes. [And I do not trust the Ellimist. He has the power to send us to another world, but it may be an extremely undesirable place]

"What would we do?" I mumbled. "Where would we live? Just … settle down in some other forest, build two more scoops and just move on, like nothing happened?"

Make a decision. Do something leaderlike. You've weighed the options, now make a choice based on your conclusions.

Home only offers death, either killed by debris, or found helpless, unconscious in a Yeerk Pool. This new world holds many options. We would be uninformed, but we wouldn't be impaired. To go was to doom Earth to slavery. To die was also to doom Earth to slavery. What a choice, when there's no right answer.

"Our duty is to survive," I told

Anifal. She hesitated, looking me in the eyes, then looked down and nodded briefly.

I turned towards the Ellimist and told him, "Take us to this new world of yours."

* * *

There was no warning sign, no time to adjust. One second we were in Misty Marshmallow Land, the next we weren't. As a matter of fact, it happened so quickly and so unobtrusively that it took the small crowd we landed with a few moments to realize that we were there at all.

Now, perhaps crowd isn't the right word, for there were only six of them, and one of them was a bird. In fact, it was only until a little later that I realized the bird was one of them at all. Perhaps the most interesting thing about this not-crowd however, was the fact that one of them was an Andalite.

Masculine, but too small to be Visser 5. For a moment, I felt hope flare wildly – _Could it be that we were dropped right in the middle of a band of Andalites? Are we really that lucky?_

"Cassie?" I asked, dumbfounded.

No. These were ordinary kids. Kids I went to school with a million years ago, about as average (and diverse) as you could want.

That didn't explain why they all were so cool with hanging out with an Andalite.

Now, you have to understand that while I've been setting the scene, a lot of things exploded into action. Moments before I blurted out Cassie's name, Anafil cried out, with a sort of agonized joy, [Andalite! Another Andalite!] The moment Cassie's name escaped my lips, there was a blue blur, and then something very sharp was pressed up against my neck. And then in a purplish-blue blur, a smaller but equally sharp blade was pressed against the _blue _blur's neck. Cassie and the others, Rachel, Jake, and Marco leaped to their feet and all began screeching hysterically at the tops of their lungs.

All in about the space of three seconds.

"Quiet!" Jake shouted, and there was quiet, even from me. Quite reasonably, I had been complaining loudly about the proximity of blade to neck (specifically my neck) and the wasted blood trickling down my throat and shoulder.

"How did you find us?" Jake demanded. He was, I'm not sure if he was even conscious of it, standing in a defensive stance slightly in front of the others.

"Yeah, and how are you not dead, Sarah?" Rachel demanded aggressively. She was changed, though it was not something you could see at first glance. Her eyes were as hard and cold as glass marbles.

"The Ellimist brought us here," I answered. The blade at my throat twitched violently, and, judging by the explosive outbursts by the others, I reasoned that they had met this fellow before as well.

"The Ellimist," Marco said bitterly. "Should've known. Fucking with lives again." He gazed at me intensely, and I got the feeling that he was weighing my potential as a threat. His eyes were the same as Rachel's.

"Oh, I uh – I'm not really dead. Well, obviously I'm not dead, I'm right here. But I – uh – faked my death. I just – did."

"Really?" Rachel asked, somewhat conversationally. "Because I remember going to the funeral, and there was a body. So you must have done a damn good job of pretending to be dead to have fooled all those people."

[Alternate universe.] Anifal reminded me, presumably in open thought-speak.

I giggled.

"Did you hear that, Anifal?" I asked her, still giggling breathlessly. "There was a body. A funeral and everything. A _body. _Why, she probably died by drowning too!"

"Yes, as a matter of fact she did," Jake said, eyes narrowed.

I exploded into full-blown laughter, doing my best not to slit my own throat on the strange Andalite's blade. "Did you hear that Anifal?" I practically screamed. "What does that make my count, two? No, three! God! Oh, oh! Oh, Anifal, I've got to stop dying, one of these days its going to stick!!"

Maybe I should have been crying, but I was fully-blown hysterical.

[Enough!] Anifal snapped. [Pull yourself together. This is no time for dramatics]

The crazed laughter subsided into heavy gulping. The heavy gulping subsided into raspy breathing. Cassie looked around nervously. "I'm so glad my parents aren't home," she mumbled. It was such an ordinary thing to say that it helped calm me down further.

Jake took charge. "Ax, step back from Sarah. You . . . strange Andalite, step off from Ax." Somewhat reluctantly it seemed, they withdrew their tails at the same moment. As one, the entire group moved until they circled Anifal and I, hemming us in. Not too close, but making it clear we weren't to go anywhere.

"The Ellimist lied," I said suddenly. Every eye turned to me, even Anifal's. Her main ones at least. Her stalk eyes were swiveling wildly, looking for an escape route.

[What do you mean?] she asked privately.

"The Ellimist said he couldn't send us to a world where we were already dead. Well, I'm dead here. He shouldn't have been able to send us here."

I stopped. Absorbed the ramifications.

"Bastard," was all I could think of.

[Bastard,] Anifal agreed. The poisonous hatred in her voice made me flinch. Made all of us flinch, even the other Andalite.

"You're gonna start with the explaining thing," Jake said. "Now."

* * *

I don't know if I convinced them or not. There were some doubtful expressions. Anifal and Aximili-Egghead-Something-Or-Other, however got along like a house on fire. It didn't take long for Ax to start shuffling his hooves and looking away, or for Anifal to fix her gaze determinedly at the ground and start fiddling with her tail blade.

It was cute. I know this because Cassie kept sneaking looks at them, and then giving me wry grins.

"So . . . you're fighting methods were pretty rough," Jake observed coolly. He looked like he didn't know what to think of me yet, and so was trying to hold me at arm's length until he figured it out.

"There were just two of us," I replied, just as coolly. I didn't know what to think of him yet either. "We did what we had to do in order to survive."

Marco was nodding like he understood, his expression slightly distant. Rachel was nodding too, although there was a flash of guilt in her eyes. Jake was all concern and guilt and disapproval mixed together. Cassie, now that the subject had been brought up, was simply avoiding my gaze.

"So, you faked your death, huh?" Rachel broke in abruptly. "Why would you do that?"

I didn't like the question. I didn't like the tone it was asked in, I didn't like the probing nature of the question, and I didn't like the answer I would have to give.

I took a deep breath, changed my mind and let it out. Then I took another one. "I had no time for real life anymore," I said.

Silence. I was compelled to go on.

"My grades were dropping to F's, I didn't have time to study or do homework anymore. I couldn't afford to be grounded, I had to be able to move freely. I -" Here my voice broke, and I hated myself for it. "- I couldn't afford to have two Controllers watching my every move, coercing me into the Sharing, and _staring_ at me with these innocent looks, knowing there's a slug looking back at you. I just . . . I couldn't."

My voice died away. I didn't mean to give away so much. I couldn't look at them.

"So!" Marco said brightly. Companionably. "We've got two new additions to the team! Dead-girl, and alien number two, the female version! Am I the only one noticing the sparks here?"

"Marco?" Rachel said conversationally.

" Yeah?"

"Shut up."

[I don't see any sparks.] Anifal stated curiously.

The tension lifted noticeably. The conversation became much less stilted. After about five more minutes, the "Animorphs" as they called themselves, began filtering out, citing homework and lateness.

"What do you call yourselves?" Cassie had asked curiously.

I glanced at Anifal, who shrugged delicately. "Um . . . Andalite bandits, I guess," I offered.

"Not very original," Marco had said, making a mock-sneering face. "You'd think such shifty characters as Andalite bandits like yourselves would have more imagination."

Cassie offered the use of her loft for the night. For me, not for Anifal, who would naturally be spending the night with Ax. Not an eyebrow was raised at this either. Naturally it wasn't put quite like that, but still. Facts are facts.

We have to find out more about these Animorphs. We need to know who we're dealing with.


End file.
